


M is for You Must Remember This

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alphabet Soup Challenge, Episode Tag, Episode: s02e21 1969, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 06:23:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack comes home from a visit to 1969.</p>
            </blockquote>





	M is for You Must Remember This

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2014 On-World Alphabet Soup Challenge. Brought to you courtesy of the letter "M" and the prompts: maintenance, messhall, mountains, Minnesota, movies, Marines.
> 
> The title is a line from the song "As Time Goes By". If you don't know that song appears in the movie _Casablanca_ , why not? It's an awesome movie.
> 
> _You must remember this_  
>  _A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh._  
>  _The fundamental things apply_  
>  _As time goes by._  
>   
> 
> Tag for the episode "1969".
> 
> I'm still not quite convinced Cheyenne Mountain ever had Titan Missile launch capability.

In May of 1961, construction started on a nuclear bunker at Cheyenne Mountain. In July of 1966, the Combat Operations Center functions were turned over to NORAD. In another July (in 1969), he was staring up at the ass-end of a Titan Missile in what had been the SGC Gate Room when he got out of bed that morning (Daniel had actually been surprised to find out there were seven Titan bunkers within 100 square miles, but the Cold War is a little recent for him). In 1976 (on some unknown date), the Air Force decided it would be a great idea to tunnel under NORAD to build a super-scientific secret project (he’s still not quite sure how they managed that, but there are questions he’s learned he really doesn’t want the answers to), and moved it in (Catherine Langford and her geeks and geeklets and—eventually—a merry band of Air Force Special Operations Forces). It was 1999 (March; late snow) the last time he parked his truck in Lot A. Which was either two weeks ago, or this morning.

Jack O’Neill really hates time-travel.

He’s got a sunburn from an August day that was thirty years ago and yesterday: the first time he saw that August he was seventeen in Minnesota waving his acceptance letter from the Academy like the Get Out Of Jail Free card that it was (in 1969, people worried about the Draft, the ’Nam, and it was ‘hell no, I won’t go,’ for half his generation and ‘my country: right or wrong’ for the other half; there’s a lesson there for cynics). It wasn’t that he wouldn’t have been proud to serve (the O’Neills tended to be Navy men), of course. It was just that he wanted to fly. (Wouldn’t you know it, four years later he was jumping out of perfectly good airplanes over the same godforsaken jungle half his high school classmates had been lost in.) And the second time—thirty years removed but not in any way that matters—he was in Washington DC, breaking into an armory to catch the brass (naquadaah) ring for a free ride home.

Apparently when you spontaneously time-travel, it becomes necessary for people to fly to your secret base in Colorado to debrief you: NID, CIA (they called them “Christians in Action” back when he was jumping out of a C-130), maybe even Air Force. Who knows? He doesn’t: the SGC is the military equivalent of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a show in their parents’ barn; it makes everything up as it goes along, including operational procedures.

But it means he and his team are stuck here until they’re cleared. Carter’s in her element, off making quantum angels dance on the heads of strange charmed pins (a joke, like so many others, that he won’t make anywhere someone can hear him: the military distrusts intelligence and the geeks always find a way to trump it) and Daniel’s probably second-guessing everything he did (Honest to God, Daniel: we get arrested for espionage during the Cold War and you think it’s a good time to practice your Russian language skills?) Teal’c’s off making up for lost _kel’no’reem_ : he thinks Earth is bizarre just to start with, and if he’s thinking about anything, he’s thinking that at least they don’t have to worry about letting a snake loose where there wasn’t one before (though if O’Neill’s learned anything in the last three years, it’s that there are too many damned snakes hiding in the attics and basements of Earth).

He’s...

He’s not sure what he’s doing. He could go to his office and start his report (a waste of time until he finds out whether or not The Powers That Be want any record of this), catch up on his paperwork, take a nap in his very uncomfortable chair (but one thing you can say for military life; you learn how to sleep anywhere). He could go to the gym, to the range, to the Commissary, or even to bed. But none of those things appeal. So he roams the halls.

These aren’t the halls of his most recent (as the memory flies) visit. These halls didn’t exist then, not until Catherine Langford (God knows how) managed to run up the curtain on the great and secret show. Even so, the SGC retains the indelible imprint of its first incarnation, despite the fact the silo was scrubbed down to concrete and new tunnels hammered out (swords not into plowshares, but bigger swords) and poured. The oldest sections of the base are cylinders suitable for moving warheads and fuel tanks; only the newer corridors are angular. There and then they went from a silo to a catwalk to a truck and were whisked out of NORAD as quickly as possible, off to the Cheyenne Mountain with windows (and cells). He wonders if Major Thornbird ever got the joke. Most of the Air Force had been _Star Trek_ fans; just his luck to draw the only one who wasn’t.

Good luck. Bad luck. You never know which it is without hindsight, and there’s always the chance you won’t survive to look back. Which may be its own kind of luck. (Pity he can’t still get away with the “dumb zoomie” act, but it hasn’t really worked since he made Major.)

He ends up in the Commissary anyway. Third shift’s coming on, which means the donuts are stale, but he takes one anyway, and a cup of coffee. Nothing to see here, just a cynical old Colonel wasting his time.

In 1969, Daniel was four and Carter wasn’t even a year old. (He’s not sure how old Teal’c was, but he wasn’t here.) O’Neill’s the only one who saw 1969 twice. As it were. A parallax view. It makes him uncomfortable. Here in the Now, thinking about the Then that (when he wasn’t looking) managed to become Now, too.

Nixon was President, Watergate was in the future, gas was thirty-five cents a gallon, classic rock was cutting edge, you could drive eighty miles an hour without getting pulled over. It’s only now that he’s willing to admit (if only to himself) that he could have been happy there. There was nothing he’d miss. Daniel bitched about the absence of cellphones, and Carter was in mourning for her computers: none of that bothered him. He’s never liked gadgets. Gadgets break; relying on technology is a good way to die. 

_There’s nothing I’d miss if we’re stuck here._ That’s the kind of thing he knows better than to say out loud, even to his team. Carter would consider it too personal, Teal’c would consider it a non sequitur. Daniel would grab it and gnaw it to death, turning it into some kind of grand confession that Colonel Jack O’Neill considers his entire life to have been a grand and unsatisfying waste of time. And it isn’t that (not exactly, and that’s why this is not going to become one of those candid remarks offered up during his psych evaluations) as much as it is the fact he doesn’t think there’s been a lot of progress in the world. A few newer and shinier toys (some larger wars), but the only possible shiny toys (great big guns) he has an interest in still lie in the future (please, God, let them show up before the snakes get their act together and wipe out everything he’s sworn to defend).

You aren’t supposed to go walking through your past. It’s supposed to be a dream, a memory distorted by time, something you can tell yourself you remember as better than it was. It’s not supposed to be something you can walk into, sit down at a lunch counter, order a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke (a buck including tip) and take a good look around at. It isn’t something that should be better than you remember. Because you can’t stay there and you can’t go back. “The best is yet to come”, as Sinatra said (his parents’ generation, not his, no matter how much Daniel affects a strategic confusion about the social history of the later 20th century), and that’s what everyone’s supposed to believe. A little careful amnesia helps. God knows he’s a master at forgetting the things that need forgetting.

The Commissary gets suddenly noisy as SG-5 comes in. It’s the team that went to 555 this morning (two weeks ago) when SG-1 took its little side-trip. It’d been supposed to be a routine First Contact; he hopes the gentle people of 555 aren’t going to judge Earth on the basis of a few Marines.

Time to go. Find his desk, find his bed, get his story straight for whoever wants to hear it in the morning. _"Yes, absolutely, we’re all very relieved to be back. None of us wanted to be stuck in the past. Funny, isn’t it: all those offworld missions and we end up getting in trouble right here on good old Planet Earth?"_

Crack a joke, crack a smile, nothing to see here, move along. Look to the future. Eyes on the prize. Command integrity. Aim high. Don’t think about a place you aren’t going to see again (if you’re lucky).

Forget.

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

#


End file.
